Opposable Thumbs —

Rocksmith: one cable makes any guitar a peripheral

Rocksmith is a different kind of rhythm game, one with the focus squarely on …

It seems like a magic trick. I'm standing in front of an Xbox 360 debug kit, playing a very early version of a game called Rocksmith, using my own guitar. The game picks up every strum, every bend, every mute. There is a slight delay between playing a note and hearing it, but you get used to the timing in a matter of minutes. The only hardware that's making this possible is a single cable that runs from my guitar to the Xbox 360.

This is the game that finally succeeded in taking the plastic instruments out of rhythm games, and it hopes to teach everyone how to play guitar.

"The cable converts the analog guitar signal to a digital format that can be read by the console—the magic is really in the software algorithms that interpret the data and figure out what note has been played, all within a tiny fraction of a second. Those algorithms have been in development for around 5 years and have gone through many iterations," Paul Cross, the creative director of Rocksmith, told Ars.

The team that began work on the technology behind the game was made up of only five people, and they had to deal with the challenge of getting the software to recognize notes, chords, slides, bends, harmonics, and everything else you can do with a real guitar.

They had to test the software with many different types of guitars to make sure it worked with all the different pickups, body types, and picking styles. Both Gibson and Epiphone sent them piles of guitars to use for testing, many of which ended up in the game.

The game also incorporates an intuitive system that increases the difficultly as you play a song, so that more and more notes are added until you're playing it for real. "Rocksmith decides what level you should play at by remembering how well you are tracking, increasing your starting difficulty and the speed at which you increase," Cross told Ars. So when you play a song for the first time there will be few notes, and as you learn to play it more will be layered on.

The game also tracks your performance through different sections of the song. If you are struggling with the solo, it will keep that at a low level until you get better, but if you excel at the rhythm portion of the song it will continue to become harder. The game works with you when playing, and once you've mastered all the sections you'll find yourself actually playing the song.

This is all held within a familiar game structure of playing concerts and unlocking new areas and minigames to work on fundamental guitar skills. The arcade section will teach you the numbering of the frets by asking you to shoot ducks going down differently numbered rows. It's fun, in a goofy way, and will teach you to move between frets without looking down. Playing the guitar is all about muscle memory, and making this sort of exercise fun goes a long way toward keeping people interested. Heck, the lesson on basic bar chords is more fun than standard practice, as you have the illusion of other people playing with you.

This isn't a rhythm game, this is real music

I asked if they were worried about launching a game in what many people consider to be a dead genre. "We really think we are entering a new market of real music, not just rhythm games. Rock Band 3 touched on this lightly with their guitar peripheral, but they still had a lot of their legacy issues from having to put the new experience in a game formula and interface that had not really changed since Konami's Guitar Freaks."

Indeed, the game doesn't look and feel as "game-y" as the Rock Band titles. The presentation is very much geared towards teaching you to play, with less emphasis on making you look like a rock star. The game wants to actually make you play like a rock star.

"People want experiences grounded in reality, and outside of actually being on stage, Rocksmith is as real as it gets, because you really are playing a real guitar and it can be any guitar you choose," Cross said.

The game quickly teaches you how to read screens like this one

That being said, Cross knew they had an uphill battle convincing the press to give them the time of day. Hence the willingness to send a pre-alpha build of the game, along with the cable and a real Epiphone guitar, to the press a week before E3. They were confident that if we would play it, we'd like it. "We're very aware that people may be skeptical that this type of game can work at all," we were told.

The game will come packaged with the cable for $79.99, and there will also be a bundle with an Epiphone Les Paul Junior for $199.99. The team spent a year playing different guitars, and this is the one they settled on as being the best fit for the game.

This may all work

The ability to use any guitar for the game, and the way the game slowly brings up the difficulty until you're playing the songs, is very different than Rock Band or Guitar Hero. The ability to play through many different virtual amps and to adjust your tone using built-in pedals and effects is also great for players just starting out. The software that makes this all happen is powerful and effective, and the arcade games that come with the software to teach you the basic skills are icing on the cake.

The question is whether or not this will find an audience, and if that audience will be able to see the teaching tool within the game instead of just another release in a dying genre. For beginners, or even intermediate guitar players, there is a lot to like here, even in the game's early stages.